13 September – 3 October 2010
Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria
Lottie Child, Emma Cocker, Karen Di Franco, Sophie Mellor, Laura Oldfield Ford, Clare Thornton
>> Click here for images of Street Training (Lottie Child)
>> Click here for images of Wasteland Drawing Walk (Laura Oldfield Ford)
>> Click here for images of Survival Bag Workshop (Clare Thornton)
>> Click here for images of Urban Nature Walk (Martin Norris)
>> Click here for documentation from ‘urban wanderer’
Urban Retreat is a series of artists commissions, activities and events reflecting on the use and value of urban/rural landscapes. It takes Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as a starting point, using socialised seclusion and public interaction to investigate the local economic and ecological landscape of Barrow-in-Furness.
Barrow’s unusual landscape charts its industry past and economic decline alongside its reclamation by both nature and current regeneration schemes. The commissioned artists will examine the urban and rural spaces. Their aim, as artists have always done, is to record our enduring relationship with the land – yet they will do this in a variety of ways with a range of materials themed around the urban and rural.
Sophie Mellor will spend a week as an urban wanderer relying on the kindness of strangers and the bounty of the land to house and feed her. Clothed in an especially designed survival jacket by Clare Thornton, she will place herself directly in Barrow’s marginalised landscapes, investing in its use and beauty through her interactions with people and place.
Lottie Child will run a Street Training session, investigating how to traverse both industrial and rural Barrow. Lottie has developed Street Training as a method to directly engage people with their surroundings through creative and playful behaviour combining parkour, movement, singing, conversation, games.
Martin Norris of South Walney Nature Reserve will lead an ‘Urban Nature Walk’ of Barrow’s wastelands, looking at how nature colonises land left fallow by industry.
Laura Oldfield Ford will take participants on a drawing ‘drift’ (walk) around Barrow’s sites of regeneration, using drawing to reassess and document how industry, politics and economics have impacted the land and its use.
As well as making the survival jacket for Sophie Mellor’s urban wander, Clare Thornton will run a ‘Survival Bag’ workshop where participants will be invited to make and customise a bag to carry the items they need to negotiate their environment.
Barrow-in-Furness Library will be hosting the Urban Retreat Lending Library, where library users can borrow books donated by Urban Retreat artists and invited patrons, for the duration of the project. Donated books will feature an especially designed book plate by Karen Di Franco.
Writer Emma Cocker will be corresponding via post with Sophie Mellor during her urban wander, and the resultant new writing will form the basis of ‘Manual for Marginal Places‘ to be published in Spring 2011.
Urban Retreat is a Close and Remote (Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter) production.
